The present invention relates to an apparatus for manoevering and performing measurements on rail vehicles.
Railroad vehicles often need manoevering into position within a given floor space, for example, inside a lockup, depot or workshop. In such cases, provision is usually made for a number of rail sections and trucks travelling along guides, each of which is provided with a short rail and designed to support and move the vehicle along the said guides.
Vehicle positioning using equipment of the aforementioned type requires a good deal of manoevering, both on the rail sections and the trucks. What is more, the said equipment is fairly complex and cumbersome, due to the large number of rail sections and trucks involved, which occupy practically the whole of the surface area within which the vehicles are to be positioned.
Test measurements must also be made at times, both on prototype vehicles at the final project stage, and on standard production vehicles as part of final testing or routine maintenance. The purpose of these measurements is to detect parameters such as the loads exchanged between each wheel and the rail, or the position of given points on the wheels or truck, for accurately determining, for example, the "natural" position of the wheel centres (i.e. unaffected by horizontal forces between the wheels and rails), parallelism of the wheel axles, and strain on the suspensions for a given vehicle attitude in relation to the rails.
Known equipment provides for performing a number of the aforementioned test measurements. One system provides for measuring the loads exchanged between the rail and wheel with the vehicle level, or with one rail raised, or on skew rails. Another provides for measuring strain on the suspensions in one of the said three configurations. Yet another provides solely for test measurements on the bare truck.
Each of the aforementioned measurements is usually made using a specific type of equipment, specially designed for the purpose and which more often than not cannot be employed for performing different tests. Whenever a series of test measurements is called for, a good deal of additional work is usually involved for setting up and positioning the equipment as required for testing. Another drawback of such equipment is that it does not provide for simulating all the rolling attitudes of the vehicle, or any special attitudes which might need investigating.
Finally, the said equipment only provides for simultaneously testing a number of the wheels on the vehicle, with the result that test findings are seriously affected by the support and constraint conditions of the remaining untested wheels.